Full AspenCat Catalog

After Paul D. finds his old slave friend Sethe in Ohio and moves in with her and her daughter Denver, a strange girl comes along by the name of "Beloved." Sethe and Denver take her in and then strange things begin to happen. Set in rural Ohio several years after the Civil War, this profoundly affecting chronicle of slavery and its aftermath is Toni Morrison's greatest novel, a dazzling achievement, and the most spellbinding reading experience of the...

Orwell's 1945 fable about the power struggles among animals on a farm parallels the situation in Russia at the time as Orwell saw it; the characters include the ruthless pig Stalin, his idealistic Trotsky-like adversary, and the simple, kindly horse who represents the common man. All animals are equals but some animals are more equal than others. George Orwell's classic satire of the Russian Revolution is the account of the bold struggle, initiated...

Thackeray's best-loved work, "Vanity Fair, is a satire of epic proportions, and proves that deep-seated cynicism and heartfelt morality don't have to get in the way of a good story. Filled with exceptionally drawn characters, biting social humor, and Thackeray's own illustrations, "Vanity Fair is not only one of the great English novels of the nineteenth century, its title has become synonymous with the follies of high society. Nicholas Dames is Assistant...

A young Algerian, Meursault, afflicted with a sort of aimless inertia, becomes embroiled in the petty intrigues of a local pimp and, somewhat inexplicably, ends up killing a man. Once he's imprisoned and eventually brought to trial, his crime, it becomes apparent, is not so much the arguably defensible murder he has committed as it is his deficient character. In the story of an ordinary man who unwittingly gets drawn into a senseless murder on a sun-drenched...

"Now in a handsome and newly revised hardcover edition: the extraordinary travelogue that has enthralled readers for more than seven centuries. Marco Polo's vivid descriptions of the splendid cities and people he encountered on his journey along the Silk Road through the Middle East, South Asia, and China opened a window for his Western readers onto the fascinations of the East and continued to grow in popularity over the succeeding centuries. To...

The first great adventure story in the Western canon, The Odyssey is a poem about violence and the aftermath of war; about wealth, poverty and power; about marriage, family and identity; and about travellers, hospitality and the changing meanings of home in a strange world. This vivid new translation - the first by a woman - matches the number of lines in the Greek original, striding at Homer's sprightly pace. Emily Wilson employs elemental, resonant...

A novel that studies the moral disintegration of a man whose obsessive desire to possess his step-daughter destroys the lives of those around him

"Jonathan Harker is travelling to Castle Dracula to see the Transylvanian noble, Count Dracula. He is begged by locals not to go there, because on the eve of St. George's Day, when the clock strikes midnight, all the evil things in the world will come full sway. But business must be done, so Jonathan makes his way to the Castle - and then his nightmare begins. His beloved wife Meena and other lost souls have fallen under the Count's horrifying spell....

Due to a lack of biographical evidence regarding the identity of Homer it has been suggested that the two great works attributed to him, the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" may in fact be the work of multiple authors passed down through a long oral tradition. While scholarship on the subject will likely never definitely prove one way or the other, it is now generally accepted that these two great epic poems are the work of a single Greek author, Homer,...

The daughter of an imprisoned debtor suffers injustices of nineteenth-century English society.